Abbott’s climate change Tea Party stirs in Canberra

Go back further into Hansard and press clippings and you find Liberal MP Luke Simpkins borrowing Alan Jones’ line about Australian emissions representing 0.0000002% of the atmosphere, Liberal MP Patrick Secker saying more people will die from global cooling, Victorian Senator Mitch Fifield describing proponents of an ETS of having a a theological approach to discussion “more suited to an inquisition”, Nationals Senator Ron Boswell describing the science as fraudulent, Liberal Senator Eric Abetz questioning the science and promoting a bogus petition of 31,000 “climate scientists”, and Liberal frontbencher Andrew Robb telling the AFR that global warming is just a leftist fad. Nationals MP John Cobb, and Liberal MPs Bob Baldwin, John Cobb and Bronwyn Bishop have also questioned whether the mainstream science has got it right.

The NSW Liberal MP Johanna Gash, one of her party’s appointees to the joint committee reviewing the Clean Energy Future package, is a fan of arch denialist Ian Plimer — “It makes for very interesting and illuminating reading” — she said of his book in 2009. Another appointee to the committee, George Christensen, who won the Queensland seat of Dawson for the Nationals in 2010, said in his maiden speech to parliament last year that the “science is not settled”.

And then, of course, there is Tony Abbott, the Coalition leader who once said the science is crap and has never really sounded convincing in claiming he’s changed his mind.

But this is not merely a game of pinning the tail on the donkey. This is a serious issue for Australian business, because the passage of the carbon price legislation by the end of the year will likely encourage domestic and international corporates to finally push the button on billions of dollars of investment — mostly in energy generation but also elsewhere — that has been held up while the fate of the carbon price remained unclear.

The Labor Party is going to great lengths to ensure that the carbon pricing legislation and the permits are “indefeasible” — which makes it extremely hard, and costly, to unwind.

Abbott has committed his party to repealing the legislation should it win government (as the polls currently suggest is likely) in 2013 and trying to estimate the depth and breadth of the Tea Party rump in a Coalition government will be a critical consideration for some investment multibillion-dollar investment decisions.

The quotes included above suggest at least a quarter of the Coalition members fall into that camp. The reality is that it might be closer to 40%. Take that into consideration with the results of the party vote when Abbott took the leadership from Malcolm Turnbull — the pro-Abbott camp, led by the climate denialist Nick Minchin, gained 35 votes, while the rest (49) were split evenly between Turnbulll and Joe Hockey. That first round vote was considered an informal on whether you accepted the science on not — if you didn’t, you voted for Abbott. If you did, you chose Turnbull or Hockey.

Abbott’s decision to send two sceptics out of five appointees to the joint committee looking at the CEF package may be a fair reflection of his party make-up. His ability to repeal the carbon price will depend on how many of his party faithful support his original proposition that the science is crap, because the Direct Action policy is untenable to anyone who thinks otherwise.

It’s about time he came out with some answers if he thinks Labor is lost, why in the hell are the news reporters not asking hard questions, how long since any-one out there read a news-paper thats had a go at the Libral Party, I can’t recall one since they hounded Kevie out of office and trying the same tactic against Julia.I honestly can’t under-stand why people believe the garbage that comes out of his mouth, Phoney Tony has never had time for females or people on welfare so its got me tossed.Maccas

Pedantic — look what happened the last time Labor wedged the coalition over the CPRS. I don’t recall that having lifted anyone’s respect for the government at the time. Bipartisanship was a ship that sailed too late in the piece to ensure the survival of Rudd or Turnbull, much less the CPRS bill.

We should have had a carbon pricing regime operating by now, had the original (highly flawed) legislation passed.

Look at where it’s all ended up and ask yourself this: do we really need to go through all of that again?

The thought that our legislature is being held hostage by these lightweights is hard to contemplate. The fact that our dominant media organs refuse to expose their nonsense regularly and in brutal detail is even worse. Is the issue really beyond the intellectual resources of most politicians and journalists?

Something you didn’t see in the media. Tony Abbott visited Port Macquarie on Tuesday and the event - organised by Bill Heffernan - was a dismal failure.

It was supposed to be an invitation-only forum for ‘community leaders’ to discuss important issues with the Rabbott, but few invitees bothered to show up. The organisers were so desperate to fill the rows of empty seats that they opened the meeting to anyone who was silly enough to want in. Even then only 85 attended, mostly pensioners. The photos on the Port Macquarie News website say it all. I bet Abbott wished they hadn’t taken those shots.

Sky News showed the whole thing and I bet Abbott wishes they hadn’t too. He looked disinterested and seemed very lacklustre - probably not the audience he had hoped for. Even Mad Bill looked bored to tears. Abbott used the meeting to bad-mouth Rob Oakeshott and to tell everyone that ‘all’ Australians want an election. That was about it, really.

If what Guy Rundle believes is true that “climate-change irrationalists” are either : stupid, delusional or malign and nihilistic, which category would you suggest the current federal opposition leader fits into?

Also, about the proposed (and soon to be enacted?) ETS.

Let’s consider the current policy a mere START. The infrastructure needs to be implemented NOW to give certainty to industry and consumers.
Initially a fixed price ETS (purposely misnamed carbon tax) will become a full fledged ETS in a few years.
The overall impact initially will be relatively minor during the “bedding down” process. Once the ETS is in place, adjustments and even modifications over time are a given, depending on changing domestic and international circumstances.

The most difficult part is to overcome a conservative and/or uninformed mindset.

The legislation will pass before the end of the year - the numbers have already been counted. Once the price on carbon pollution comes into effect next year, things will start to settle down. There is no way all that cr*p spouted by rAbbott is going to happen, and people might then see some sense and realise that they have been sold a load of rubbish by the coalition.
Whether this will lead to a change in Labor’s fortunes is the great unknown. However, I don’t think there will be a change of PM for at least 12 months, probably longer. Maybe early 2013, if the polls remain as bad as they are now. We will just have to wait and see.

I dont think Abbott can possibly get rid of the legislation once it is in, for a few reasons:
1) He wont win a majority in the whole Senate with a normal half senate election, and so the labor Green Senators will block any such proposal
2) There will be penalty clauses in the legislation that will make it very expensive to change it.
3) Other nations are (have been for years some of them) doing similar things already - lots of other nations. Our system evolving into an ETS after 3 years will make it very much a part of a world trend and global trading. (There are so many nations already doing similar things. Even China has plans to bring in a Carbon Trading scheme by 2015 for 7 provinces and 5 major cities - that affects over 250 million people).
4) They would find it very very hard to LOWER the tax free threshold back down to $6000 a year, or to take back off Pensioners their pay rise, etc.

I can give the Liberal party some strategies to make themselves look good for “backflipping” on this:
1) They can blame the senate (and say they wont waste tax payers money calling a double dissolution - a DD might not give them the senate still of course: lots of small parties and independents have better chances of winning in a DD when the quota is half). When the senate blocks the feeble attempt to undo it, they can say “we kept our promise - we tried - but we got blocked by the evil Labor and Greens parties.”
2) They can say “the world has changed over the last couple of years and it seems that much of the trading world is going that way now, and so we need to be a part of it - it is not our ideal way forward but at least others are doing it now” (they can give the impression that dozens of places have not been doin git for years already! I am sure the popular media wont correct them)
3) They can say “because of the penalty clauses it would cost billions in compensation to undo it - bloody Labor and the Greens”

Or how about this… they just quietly forget all about it and talk about other things…. that has happened before. Aussies can forget about big things very quickly it seems. Just feed us something else to distract us. (Fukushima? where is that? something happen there? ….)

If the majority of Liberal MPs accept the science, why do we have to put up with all this rubbish from Abbott? I can’t believe that we are facing the prospect of a PM who believes that climate change is crap.

Senator Sean Edwards may well have said that reducing emissions wouldn’t lower temperatures for 1000 years but Tim Flannery said it first. Giles Parkinson appears to ridicule Senator Williams for his comments on the rise in sea levels from 18,000 years ago but did not deny them. Just as well or he would have displayed his colossal ignorance. Senator Williams is right, ask any geologist. Nobody is denying climate change, only the anthropogenic contribution. Climate change is and always has been driven by the dynamics of the solar system and in particular the amount of radiant energy at any given time received by this planet from the Sun. As the oceans warm dissolved carbon dioxide is disgorged into the atmosphere. Elevated Co2 levels in the atmosphere are a result not a cause of global warming, demonstrated by the fact that ice core data has shown that in the past that atmospheric levels have continued to rise for up to 1000 years after global temperatures have commenced to fall.

Most, if not all, of the five global mass extinctions in Earth’s history carry the fingerprints of the main symptoms of global carbon perturbations (global warming, ocean acidification and anoxia or lack of oxygen.)

It is these three factors — the ‘deadly trio’ — which are present in the ocean today. In fact, the current carbon perturbation is unprecedented in the Earth’s history because of the high rate and speed of change. Acidification is occurring faster than in the past 55 million years, and with the added man-made stressors of overfishing and pollution, undermining ocean resilience. ( Source: Professor Jelle Bijma, Marine Biogeosciences, Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research):

http: //www. stateoftheocean.org/ipso-2011-workshop-summary.cfm

Mass extinction at the Triassic-Jurassic (Tr-J) boundary occurred about the same time (200 Ma) as one of the largest volcanic eruptive events known, that which characterized the Central Atlantic magmatic province. Homo Stupidus is merely the new kid on the block (and the most destructive). Luckily for humans they were not around during the mass extinctions to dirty things up a bit and hasten the catastrophic process of self-destruction.

“Do the Earth’s volcanoes emit more CO2 than human activities? Research findings indicate that the answer to this frequently asked question is a clear and unequivocal, “No.” Human activities, responsible for a projected 35 billion metric tons (gigatons) of CO2 emissions in 2010 (Friedlingstein et al., 2010), release an amount of CO2 that dwarfs the annual CO2 emissions of all the world’s degassing subaerial and submarine volcanoes (Gerlach, 2011).

“The published estimates of the global CO2 emission rate for all degassing subaerial (on land) and submarine volcanoes lie in a range from 0.13 gigaton to 0.44 gigaton per year (Gerlach, 1991; Varekamp et al., 1992; Allard, 1992; Sano and Williams, 1996; Marty and Tolstikhin, 1998). The preferred global estimates of the authors of these studies range from about 0.15 to 0.26 gigaton per year. The 35-gigaton projected anthropogenic CO2 emission for 2010 is about 80 to 270 times larger than the respective maximum and minimum annual global volcanic CO2 emission estimates. It is 135 times larger than the highest preferred global volcanic CO2 estimate of 0.26 gigaton per year (Marty and Tolstikhin, 1998).

“In recent times, about 70 volcanoes are normally active each year on the Earth’s subaerial terrain. One of these is Kīlauea volcano in Hawaii, which has an annual baseline CO2 output of about 0.0031 gigatons per year [Gerlach et al., 2002]. It would take a huge addition of volcanoes to the subaerial landscape—the equivalent of an extra 11,200 Kīlauea volcanoes—to scale up the global volcanic CO2 emission rate to the anthropogenic CO2 emission rate.

“Similarly, scaling up the volcanic rate to the current anthropogenic rate by adding more submarine volcanoes would require an addition of about 360 more mid-ocean ridge systems to the sea floor, based on mid-ocean ridge CO2 estimates of Marty and Tolstikhin (1998).” (Source: US Geological Survey.)

Take that to the unenlightened geologists to whom you refer, John Geary of Australian International Petro-Consultants (AIPC)

The mass extinctions Flower refers to and the late Quaternary sea level rises occurred without any anthropogenic contribution. In the coldest known period of Earth’s history, the Neo Proterozoic about 760 million years ago, (Snowball Earth) CO2 levels in the atmosphere were many times higher than at present. It’s the Sun stupid.

@JOHN GEARY posted Tuesday, 4 October 2011 at 1:55 am
Let me put a complex issue as simply as possible.
Do you agree as FLOWER points out that “global carbon perturbations” are and have been cyclical over time? YES / NO ?
Do you agree that anthropogenic actions have “added” to the current cycle? YES / NO ?
Do you agree that it is in the world’s interest to curb anthropogenic “pollution”? YES / NO ?

If the answer to these questions is YES let’s find the best solutions to minimise the impact as best we can. Starting with a fixed price ETS.

So then you’re doing away with the current understanding of greenhouse gases and instead suggesting it’s all solar radiation variance that causes climate change?

Can you please explain the fact that without a greenhouse effect, relying totally on the sun’s warmth, the average temperature would be around -18 degrees centigrade? Does it just cut off at the exact point where ‘AGW’ would start?

Where is this mysterious extra heat coming from? Also given we directly measure solar output, how has it increased without us knowing - particularly since it’s actually been weaker than average of late?

Also you’re wrong about CO2 levels under ‘snowball earth’ - please get your talking points correct. The one you want is that CO2 sometimes lags behind temperature increase, although it’s kind of a strawman since not every increase in temperature is caused initially by CO2 but instead, as the records show, increasing temperatures release more CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) and that these lead to even greater temperature increases.